The Logic of an Information Society
Living Make-Belief, Chapter 5
I’m spending the next few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.
The fifth chapter of Living Make-Belief covers the changes that have taken place during the last 80 years. Dator’s basic arc: in the middle of the 20th century, due to increasing automation in manufacturing, the first post-industrial societies emerged, with information/knowledge work becoming ascendant. High manufacturing output and the centering of knowledge created the material conditions for the environmental movement and the hippie counterculture as one vision of what was possible if we all agreed that what we had was enough1. The dominant society was transformed by some of this (women’s rights, for example), grudgingly accepted a little bit of other parts (like environmentalism), and rejected the overall communitarian ethos in favor of the elevation of individual accumulation that took off in the 1980s with the election of Reagan and Thatcher, continuing through to today’s hustle culture and the singular influence of Donald Trump, who positions himself as an avatar of individual success.
Some of the complexity of this story compared to earlier periods of history is, I suspect, the fact that Dator lived through this one personally. I get the sense that this is how history looks when you’re actually “in” it: the multiple threads and open possibilities haven’t been resolved and then trimmed from public consciousness/memory.
Part of this is a pretty straightforward map to the values work of Andy Hines: Industrial Society is the early manifestation of a Modern worldview, and Information Society is the later manifestation, once enough physical infrastructure is in place. The hippies represented the beginning of a Postmodern voice in society beyond the academy, but it took decades for this to grow to the point where major institutions and societal logic began to change2. However, this begs the question: is the Information/Knowledge Society its own thing, or just another form of an Industrial Society? Dator rejects the latter, and there are lots of reasons to see it as a distinct arrangement:
Knowledge work values “mental labor based on education, patience, and detail” more than “brute physical strength” (p. 32), shifting economic power and status to women and enabling the rise of modern feminism.
Not mentioned by Dator but relevant: knowledge work is inherently more unequal than manufacturing; this is the “10x engineer” idea. This may explain the shift to hyper-individualism as the role of individual skill becomes more salient.
The knowledge economy has its own logic. Information is freely self-replicating, but, since capitalism relies on scarcity of output, we try to protect its exclusivity via the institution of intellectual property, which Dator describes as “very silly” (p. 35). This makes society an increasingly artificial game where we make up fake jobs to keep people busy and to avoid replacing the labor market as the dominant vehicle for economic distribution3.
If we’re following the proposed causal model from last week (communication technology → social forms and metaphors → development/wealth → values → consumer behavior), it suggests that Industrial and Information societies may actually be associated with two different sets of values that Hines is conflating: success-community to success-individual. Note that these are similar to but distinct from the two dimensions in the World Values Survey (traditional/secular and survival/self-expression).
Interestingly enough, hippies thought they were evoking an earlier age, centered on agriculture and earlier values of simplicity rather than success and accumulation (whole earth catalog); one example is the Whole Earth Catalog. This topic of cycles needs more development in future articles.
And the Postmodernism of today looks very different from that of the 60s counterculture; this is tied to the “mean green meme” that I need to dig into soon.
Possible images of what comes next as we resolve these contradictions are at the center of Andy Hine’s new book Imagining After Capitalism, which I will definitely read and write about eventually.